GARLAND, Texas — Pamela Geller is a 56-year-old Jewish arch-conservative from New York, a vehement critic of radical Islam who organized a provocative $10,000 cartoon contest in this placid Dallas suburb designed to caricature the prophet Muhammad.

Elton Simpson was a 30-year-old aspiring Islamic militant from Phoenix who fantasized to an FBI informant about “doing the martyrdom operations” in Somalia and was convicted in 2010 of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to the volatile eastern African nation.

Their lives intersected Sunday in this small town in north-central Texas, an unlikely venue for a violent collision of cultures. After a Sunday evening shootout outside the contest site between police and Simpson and another man firing assault rifles, both gunmen lay dead in the street. And Geller quickly posted a defiant blog: “This is a war on free speech. ... Are we going to surrender to these monsters?”

The Lone Star State has 1,216 incorporated cities, notes the Texas Almanac. Of those, 1,202 have fewer residents than Garland, which besides being a "small town" ranks as the 12th-largest city in Texas — behind only Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, El Paso, Arlington, Corpus Christi, Plano, Laredo and Lubbock.

Honestly, though, I meant more complicated details than the size of the community where the attack occurred. But if the Times can't get that simple fact right, how can anyone take seriously the rest of what the newspaper reports as fact?

My suggestion for the Times next time it's tempted to resort to the hackneyed "it's-so-shocking-that-this-occurred-in-a-small-town!" lede: Report the actual number of residents. Then readers can decide for themselves whether it's Mayberry or one-seventh the size of Manhattan.